Gina Gotthilf: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was that change on the landing page you did that increased conversion so much, do you remember? None of this is going to blow anyone's minds, I think, because it's very best practices. But it's easy to overlook when you're so focused on so many different steps of a process. The first one is making it mobile-optimized. People who are working, are working on their computers, on desktop computers, even today. We forget that most people are looking at pages on our phones. And that has been the case for a while, and I think it's just increasing. So you need to make sure that that experience of looking at something on your phone, whatever your phone is, is great. And what that means is from a landing page perspective, super simple. First, the core copy, the message and button need to be above the fold. Or, if you're not going to keep the button above the fold, which I still recommend, but if you're not going to do that for whatever reason, then you need to have a very clear indicator that there's something to scroll towards on your page. The second thing, applies to both desktop and mobile, is people skim. And copywriters don't like to believe that, much like journalists don't like to believe that people just read headlines. It's just how it is. People are busy and lazy, myself included. So you can write all of this beautiful messaging that you've thought through, but if people are not going to read it, it doesn't matter. So you have to approach a landing page with that perspective in as much as possible. And so for me, what makes something particularly skimmable is first restricting copy a lot. And even copy that seems short is probably not short enough. Second, so people normally like to have a title, some sort of subtitle, and then an image and a button. Those are kind of core pieces of some sort of landing page experience. Having the title and the button speak to each other is really cool. Because if people only read the title and the button, they got it. It can't be like, "Wouldn't you like the next President of the United States to blah blah blah?" And then a whole explanation of what. And then the button is like, I don't know, apply. Whatever, right? It's like, apply for what? Now I have to go read the thing and I didn't get it. So just keeping those two things super speaking to each other. And then of course, making sure that that landing page speaks to the ad experience. And that's something that I think people do pay some attention to. Finally, there's an element of emotion to it. Which I didn't get super deep in, but just very basic. My job was to create a landing page that made people ... So it was actually, funnily enough, before Covid hit the US. And then Covid hit the US. Half the people in the campaign got Covid on our sad goodbye Mike Bloomberg party. And I had already bounced, and I left New York. I was scared. I was like, the city's going to be a Petri dish. And I spent months trying to convince the whole United States, as much as I could, that Covid was going to hit the United States. w York. I was scared. I was like, the city's going to be a Petri dish. And I spent months trying to convince the whole United States, as much as I could, that Covid was going to hit the United States. And there were going to be a lot of deaths unless we had a different president. And so I, of course, convinced myself very effectively that we were in grave danger. And so to do that, we had images in the background of different sorts, Mike Bloomberg and whatever. But fear really inspires people, and that's just a truth about human psychology. Especially when it comes to a presidential campaign. So having dark colors like black, having Trump in sort of a black scenario, kind of looking down and looking a little menacing is more powerful than having Trump looking ridiculous, for example. In the context of, we need to take action, otherwise there will be deaths because of this. So it depends on the concept, but don't underplay the importance of understanding how people are going to feel when they see something, and whether that's going to lead them to take action. Keeping it super, super simple. Because also the other thing I see is a lot of images. It is like, no, the image can't distract from your core message. It has to be a background thing that aids in the digestion of that message.…

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